User generated content, online video, social networks (like Facebook) and microblogging services (like Twitter) are now as much a part of our everyday lives as much as taxes, going shopping and using mobile phones.

So might it be a good idea to empower participants in research to not only type to express themselves, but also use and contribute other forms of rich media? A normal ‘Bulletin Board’ (we don’t like that name either) allows respondents to run through some questions, and be probed by a moderator – some also offer the ability for your clients to observe. Next-gen boards allow you to do a lot more. If you’re planning immersive research, or want to capture ‘a day in the life of  ‘X” – then there is no better way to do it than on a next-gen board, using tools that almost everyone has today – a browser and a mobile phone.

So, with VisionsLive Bulletin Boards 2.0 you can also go beyond static images and text, engage participants with interactive whiteboards, uploads, drawing and annotations and more. You can also present many kinds of rich stimuli the way you need – video, audio, images, and interactive whiteboards. Keep participants in the loop and on-task with an easy-to-use dashboard, and multi-mode communications including email, private messaging and Text Message communications using SMS – direct from your desktop.

Empower your participants to easily upload photos and make video entries, as well as the usual typed entries. Invite your clients to observe, comment and note-take on discussions easily without having to leave their home or office.

Web 2.0 is about people power combined with an unprecedented speed and richness of communication. VisionsLive Bulletin Boards 2.0 harness this power to yield richer insights, faster, globally.

The ability to see and hear respondents clearly has for many years been seen as essential to get online qualitative on par with traditional, facilities based qual sessions. With the advent of fast Internet, in-built cameras and microphones this should be the age of the audio visual focus group. Well, partly. VisionsLive runs hundreds of online focus groups each month, providing options for both audio visual and non audio visual sessions, so we can give you a bit of insight. The surprise finding is that non audio visual groups have trumped video based focus groups by a factor of 10 in terms of client uptake! Why? Firstly, apart from the ability to see and hear respondents, the functionality of VisionsLive audio visual groups and non-audio visual groups is identical.

Secondly, every make of computer comes with different default settings for microphones and sound, so if your respondents are not technically savvy, even though our platform for conducting audio visual qual is technically sound, users can still have difficulty if headsets are not plugged in correctly or sound settings are on mute. VisionsLive provides certified headsets and webcams that work automatically without software to make life easy for respondents, but even this does not help if it’s not plugged in correctly!

Thirdly, if internal pilots are being conducted by different users inside the same market research agency, those users are often using the same internet connection, meaning that bandwidth can be spread too thin to guarantee a great audio visual experience. In contrast non-audio visual groups don’t require any external hardware, can accommodate more respondents (up to 12 instead of just 6 for Audio visual groups) and the transcripts are available immediately after the session. There will always be demand for full video and audio during online qual sessions, but as long as we all use different computers, non-audio visual groups are likely to continue topping the sales charts. That said, who knows what the future holds?

Very late last century, 30 or so quallies crammed into a darkened room in an internet café – the first time some had ever set foot in such a place. We were all driven by curiosity about our own future, lured by the promise of magical new abilities, and slightly in awe of the presenter, Michael Herbert, who had pioneered ‘Cyberqual’ in 1994 and was now going to show us how to run online groups.

It would be a number of years before the number of UK qualitative researchers using online methodologies could be counted on the fingers of more than one hand. There were anxieties about how to recruit and confirm identities, finding respondents with good enough computer and typing skills – and these were the days before broadband so sharing stimulus material was a challenge.

However the biggest barrier was the lack of feel. Where was the emoticon for mismatch between a statement and a tone of voice? Where were the powerful silences, the meaningful looks, the words unspoken yet felt? No chance of using subtle questioning techniques or any but the most basic verbal projectives. Most of us decided the few advantages of online did not outweigh the disadvantages.

So, 10 years later, what has changed?
Well, how do you feel if your broadband is down for more than an hour? Suppose you left the house without your mobile? Suppose you lost your laptop?
In these situations people tell us they feel anxious, disconnected, cut off, unloved. Chunks of their identity are left elsewhere, people feel detached from their social and work worlds. It has become the norm to reach out to others through emails, texts and various forms of social networking. Connecting online has become both meaningful and emotional in that it recognisably fulfils a fundamental human need to be part of a broader social group.

Technologically, broadband, interactive online whiteboards, the ability of respondents and researchers alike to upload and download are key to improving the interactivity and feel of online qual. You can create collages online from participant generated material, you can do sorting and mapping exercises, embed videos, work with visual metaphors – and the participants have as much or as little control over the output as you wish. Clients can sit in a virtual back room and interact with the moderator from the comfort of their office.

Research can now be based more in the real world than in a studio and can use several channels to creatively explore the world of the participant. As opposed to mere respondents, participants can be much more active in the process, engaged in a range of tasks at different times, iteratively building and commenting on the research issues.

Yes, but, we still can’t see or feel ‘the spaces between words’ as Wendy Gordon so eloquently put it. Written communications can be more detailed and better thought through than verbal responses, but as quallies we are used to working with empathy, energy and emotion, and all of those are still problematic in the online world.

This would be a great drawback for online qualitative research if it were not for one thing – the rise of the focus group. What are commonly known as focus groups used to be called group discussions and there are differences other than semantics. Mary Goodyear famously wrote a paper describing ‘group discussions’ as ‘conative’ – exploratory, based on eliciting participants own thought structures as material for analysis and interpretation to provide deeper understanding, while ‘focus groups’ (then more predominant in the US) were ‘cognitive’ – more structured, disciplined, less interaction between participants, and designed to elicit information that was taken more at face value.

The internationalisation and commoditisation of research has meant the spread of the US model so that now all groups are routinely called focus groups (even if they are more like group discussions) and there is a trend towards more prescribed, client designed topic guides that unwittingly restrict researcher exploration and interpretation. This model works well for many clients, although one of the best critiques of this approach comes from the American Gerald Zaltman – see his book How Consumers Think.

It is exactly these ‘cognitive’ types of research projects that are ripe for online groups – set topics, simple stimulus and basic projectives, responses from everyone and the instant gratification of transcripts immediately after. Not to mention projects about the increasingly important online world, which sit more naturally in an online environment. The role of face to face will be ‘conative’, exploring and understanding the lived experience of the individual, in a social context, and how they make sense of, and interpret the products and services they interact with.

Back to Michael Herbert, this time from his paper at the AQR-QRCA Conference Qualitative Research in the 21st Century. There is a role for both online and face to face:

This study has been about comparing online qualitative with face to face using the same respondents in both types of group. The evidence suggests that both are meaningful and interactive experiences for the respondents although they recognise them as different processes…… We would argue based on this study and our online qualitative experience, that it is a valid and meaningful way of conducting qualitative research for both respondents and researcher.

Qualitative is about to diverge, not just into two, but into three different strands. Online, for the day to day ‘lets add a bit of knowledge’ research, face to face for in depth understanding and hypothesis building – and yes, back to online again for the third strand – multi-method insight.

We do have magical new abilities after all, thanks to the combination of mobile phones, cameras and the internet. We can see exactly what our participants are seeing at each of their points of contact with the brand, we can ask them what they are doing, thinking, feeling at any time. We can watch or build communities, use analytics to discover who is saying what about any given topic, build mind clouds, do research without leaving the desk. Embedding focus groups within a range of other methodologies, at other points during the research process. strengthens the robustness and validity of the research project. Coming at the research problem from a number of different perspectives increases the chances for insight generation.

In another 10 years there will be no more debate about online or face to face; our only issue will be keeping abreast of all the new developments and opportunities for creating relevant understanding for our clients.

End note …

“Joanna Chrzanowska and myself launched a training course for researchers to offer an introduction to running qualitative research online. An indication of the level of interest was that we sold out the course 3 times over in a matter of days – so this is clearly an area of huge interest. In the past clients have been sceptical about running qual research online as an alternative to face to face groups but I hope we have been able to show how useful it can be. We used the Visionslive platform for the 90 minute live chatroom style session – and put together a webjam (www.webjam.com) to let participants experience the bulletin board approach where sessions can be run for days or weeks if desired. Visionslive worked very well as a way to gather immediate feedback and for allowing respondents to post and comment on multimedia content. The fact that I was able to participate on a train heading up the East Coast for one of the courses is a strong indication that online research really is coming into its own as a research tool you can run with participants everywhere. >From anywhere!”

John Griffiths – Qual Research practitioner , trainer and writer, Winner Best New Thinking (MRS Conference 2004). Speaker, facilitator for WARC, APG, IDM and MRS

VisionLive uses Marketing Week Live to launch its new online focus groups

London, United Kingdom – 3rd June 2009
VisionsLive UK Limited, will be launching the long anticipated version 2.0 of its Online Focus Groups, at its first exhibition at the Insights Show (part of Marketing Week Live) on the 30th of June to the 1st of July 2009 at Olympia, London.  Industry commentators have described VisionsLive Online Focus groups as the most advanced and cost effective means of conducting focus groups online.  Their key strength lies in the ability to yield richer market insights through the use of classic projective exercises rich media  and collaboration, in a live, interactive online environment.

Online Focus Groups enable savings in excess of 70% compared with physical focus groups.  Moderators and respondents are able to conduct multi-country studies in a matter of hours or days without booking a single flight.  To put this into context, VisionsLive was recently used in an unprecedented 12 focus groups in 24 hours in 12 different time zones as part of Belgian research firm Insites BV’s “The longest day: Online Discussion Groups around the world in 24 hours” that gleaned consumer attitudes to corporate social responsibility.

Key features of VisionsLive Focus Groups 2.0 at a glance:

• Intuitive whiteboard with interactive tools and rich media capabilities that allow respondents to conduct classic projective exercises, annotate and express preferences
• View images in full screen and video in large format
• There are no set up fees
• SMS/Text reminders for respondents before a session.
• Customisable colours and branding.
• System failsafes and checking prior to sessions
• There is no software installation required.  Will operate on any operating system or browser
• Over 100 respondent languages available
• Set up exercises and discussion guide in advance

“The fact that this year’s Insights Research show is integrated with events for Online Marketing, Data and In Store marketing is indicative of the influence the Internet has had on the progression of integrated marketing.  Brands connecting with their consumers in an online environment is no longer a gimmick, it is now a standard way of engaging and communicating with customers.  VisionsLive is a means of facilitating this natural exchange in a cost effective and engaging manner, will little risk.”
VisionsLive will provide a free user account to all interested visitors at the Insights Show as well as provide live demonstrations.  The user account can be used to test-drive the new platform at no cost.